Friday Mailbag 10-21-11
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
I forgot that yesterday was supposed to be Friday mailbag day! It’s not totally my fault, I was massively hung over till like 3 in the afternoon. So this week we’ll do the mail call on Saturday. Why not!
Question 1:
From Larry S. “I noticed in your Adsense Layout that you only use 1 Adsense ad. Why don’t you put more ads on there?”
Great question Larry. That layout you mentioned is my default layout, but I do test others from time to time. When I test different layouts, the number of ads and their placement is one thing that I often take a look at.
The simple answer is that my layout works and so why mess with a good thing? But in actuality it can be a little more complicated and has to do with dilution and saturation.
Adsense is set up kind of weird, in that it will often display the highest paying ads first, and decrease accordingly. By adding more ads to your site, you can get worse ads being displayed, which can mess with your click through rate and EPC rate.
At least, that’s how it’s always been explained to me. I’m not really sure I can speak definitively on that subject.
Think of it this way…if you put two ad blocks up, they’ll show links from 8 advertisers. If that particular niche only has 5 advertisers, you’ll get 5 real ad links and 3 generic ones. Those generic ads can mess things up in a number of ways.
I think the best thing for people to do is use my general site layout, but then test different layouts including different ad placement, different ad sizes, and even picture ads vs the text ads that I use. Find out what works best for you! I’ve seen a lot of interesting ad layouts in the past that I’ve been meaning to test myself…
I’m sure I’ll write about it when I do finally get around to running some tests.
Question 2:
From Tracy G. “Do you use youtube videos on your adsense web sites?”
Great question! I generally don’t use videos on my websites…but I don’t have a real reason for that… I have been working on a couple of different site layouts that incorporate video in different ways, but I haven’t been able to find the time to test them extensively yet. But when I do, I’ll report back.
Video can be a good way to add content to your site, but I only recommend it if it really compliments your site content. Obviously, don’t just post random videos. However, posting other people’s video’s on your site is fine as long as they compliment your content.
Better yet, create your own videos and post them on your site. It doesn’t even have to be you on camera, it can be a screen capture or even the articles you’ve written for your site, spoken and recorded onto video with a slideshow type background.
These strategies fit more into a thick site strategy and don’t really work so well for my churn and burn business plan of cranking out thousands of adsense sites automatically.
Keep those questions coming, and in the mean time…keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
